Customers’ support

What is social media customer service? 

Social customer service is, quite simply, customer service conducted via social media channels. It is the most immediate and accessible tool for being in touch with your clients, offering quick solutions, dealing with complaints, and reviewing shortcomings. Easy access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram allows people to feel personal contact with the company and doesn’t need much money to invest. Multiple channels can be used to engage different groups of customers and create the impression of a “face-to-face” dialogue. From the client’s perspective, this communication form is much more convenient than trying to call the “hotline” for hours.

Channels involved to make it all work

The main challenge that every company faces, tuning customer service social media, in the beginning, is the variety of information and its origins. Therefore, it can be tough to concentrate and choose specific ones. Here we invite you to see the most common and affordable social media sources for e-commerce customer service support for buyers, according to zdnet.com.

As you can see, social media customer service tools like Facebook and Twitter are quite well-known and are the most effective in targeting. You might also have clients using Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. 

To look up where your consumers are, search social media customer service platforms for your brand’s likes, mentions, and tags. Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook’s search bar can be used for manual research. 

The most successful way to understand what customers think of your company is to invest in social media monitoring tools. These unique platforms are designed to pursue your brand mentions and to be ahead in answering buyers’ requests. 

You need to understand that it is the consumer who has power over the brand image, not the brand itself. Few or no responses to people’s demands can have a fatal impact on the company’s reputation.

How to implement a social customer service strategy? 

So, here we are, and we are ready to finally introduce a customer service strategy and explore the role of social media in customer service.

1. Gather your team. The first step might be a loyal team, which understands your main goals and shares your beliefs. At least, you have to distinctly explain your customer service vision to negotiate the right conversation. Of course, if you are just a little company, you probably would like to manage social customer service yourself, but it’s going to be much easier to hire professionals. Companies with good customer service on social media typically have a specially designed social customer response team. 

2. Make a devoted social handle for customer support. The best social media customer service examples mainly use a separate social media handle. Your social marketing team will provide the major account, with all the necessary data, about your brand’s latest innovations. At the same time, your customer service team will filter out technical problems and support. This allows effectively dividing both accounts.

However, your customers may still write on a leading account. The customer service team will successfully redirect clients by responding, for instance, indirect messages. Also, don’t forget to put a link on your support account in case you have two accounts. In the bio of your main profile, MacDonald’s can be an excellent example.

3. Customer Service in Social Media Guidelines (instructions for your social media customer service coordinators). One of your primary purposes is to create a brand’s style. It has to be juxtaposed with the general concept of your company. 

For instance, it can include:

• Tone of conversation
• Your preferable answer time 
• Dealing with customer issues and social media crises
• A response text, in advance

4. Implementing a chatbot. To answer 24/7 and to make the life of your customer service team easier, from the beginning, install a chatbot for frequently asked questions. It’s going to promptly approach the most popular requests and, thereby, give your team more time with other, less typical issues. 

5. Answer no matter what and quickly. Not all the people writing to you are your clients, but all people, who got the answer, become your potential customers. Caring about your social media audience proves your credibility and makes a great impression on your brand. 

6. Set up the right conversation. Sometimes conversation needs to be taken private. Direct Messages is a great solution when you demand a client’s data or need more information to solve an issue.

After sending a private message, don’t forget to answer back in public dialogue. Frase like “We’ve replied to you in DM, check it out, please” will sound excellent. This action will show to other users that you are not ignoring the question.

By the way, introducing yourself while providing private talk is also quite crucial. You don’t have to write your name at the beginning of every message, but finishing with it would be a perfect strategy. 

7. Create useful content. Companies using social media effectively for customer service usually utilize their social media pages for sharing news. It could be launching a product or showing a working process inside-out. You can make a creative blog, revealing insights that will give clients valuable information and reduce questions. It’s all about exploring to your customers the best sides of your product. 

8. Exceed customer expectations. Why can people reinvent customer service with social media, and how social media deflects customer service issues? The answer is quite easy – be two steps ahead.

As a rule, customers expect friendly, fast, and quality service. You can’t just deal with customer service complaints on social media since this is the past customer service. Now, social media and businesses to offer better customer service have to outdo expectations. For that, you should have a strict strategy and a marketing plan, which includes some additional actions.

9. Match the specific social media activity to the most appropriate customer service. This step should be based on your previous market research. You ought to have a clear understanding of where to look for your customers, grounded on specific market segments. While receiving social media customer service reports, keep track of which form of social media activity your customers enjoy the most. If it’s more about bright pictures – Instagram might be the right solution, educational videos – you are welcome to Youtube. Also, worth considering that 80% of accounts on LinkedIn breed B2B businesses.

Social media and the culture of customer service

• Activate internal communication channels – The more complex the structure of your company, the harder it is for employees to understand how their roles and tasks affect the whole company and the customer. Increasing openness in communication between people employed in your company will help them better appreciate their place in the organization and better understand the problems they’re supposed to solve. Therefore, it’s worthwhile to keep employees constantly informed about what also applies to other activities than those that fall within the scope of their duties. This can be done in the form of meetings and/or short and concise internal newsletters.
• Build employee value and trust – Conducting business and customer-oriented communication requires the company to trust its employees. If you believe that an employee is able to represent the brand and to provide a consumer-oriented, competent service. Then as management, you should show this trust by enabling employees to speak on behalf of the company and introduce some freedom in building relationships with customers.
• Share feedback – One of the key methods to understand customer needs and where they’re coming from is to share consumer feedback with relevant departments in your company. It’s best practice to create complementary statements, complaints or brand suggestions and share them with the people working in the company. What’s more, it’s also worth providing a gateway for employees and departments who might have an idea for solving a given problem. In this way, all employees have a chance to get to know the customer and their needs better.

Customers In Social Media – How To Get Them?

• Brand awareness – if someone doesn’t know about your business, it’s hard to buy any of your products or invest in your services. Building awareness among potential customers that your brand even exists is the first task facing anyone who wants to reach them online. But also the first step in establishing long-term relationships. 
• Enhancing the image – of course, building brand awareness is a long-term process and is geared towards more and more new customers. At the same time, however, you should take care of those who know your brand a little better – first of all, not letting them forget about you. Secondly, when providing useful content – it’s worth investing in webinars, training or e-books – generally speaking, generate high-quality, valuable content that customers want.
• Commitment – once the customer knows your brand, you can say that we’re halfway there. However, there is still a long way to go to complete the full cycle of his journey. In the vast majority of business models, the customer’s adventure with the brand starts with a free trial period, a product sample, a discount code…. even if the purchase is made at full price, you might still treat it as the first episode of a longer (preferably infinite!) adventure with the goods you supply.